Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

It’s a conversation I have often. Someone will come in with an old artifact, or an old edition of a book, or sometimes just a photo of an item. And they’ll show it to me, and I’ll say something like, ”Oh, that’s a jobber’s stamp. They used to use them for logging; it’s a kind of hammer with letters on one end. You’d whack it into the end of the logs, and the letters would mark which company the logs belonged to. They were in common use in the mid-1800s.”

And then the next question.

“How much could I get for it?”

And I can’t give them an answer—I’m not allowed. No, don’t ask me to put it in a range, either—As a professional historian, I’m not even allowed to make a guess. I can’t put a price on an item, I can’t even estimate how much it might be. Not only am I not allowed, I’m not qualified.

When someone shows me an old item, I can tell them what it was, and what it was used for. Generally, I can make a guess as to how old it might be. But I’m absolutely not allowed to talk money.

It’s amazing how many people I get who refuse to accept this. I’ve had people try to wheedle an amount out of me, to claim it’s only an informal guess, to pressure me into naming some amount. I have to respond by telling them that I’m not a trained appraiser, and suggest that they find one of those.

The issue is that when it comes to value, I’m not qualified to know what I’m talking about. If I put a price on your item, and it turns out to be too high, you can’t sell it and you’re mad at me. If I’m too low, and you sell it for that and then find out you could have made more, you could take me to court. So I won’t discuss price, period. It’s one of the rules I have to follow.

Some people get the idea of going on Ebay, or a similar website, and checking to see what the same item is going for there. I tend to discourage this. Remember how I said I’m not a qualified appraiser? As a general rule, the prices on Ebay are chosen by random people who are also not qualified appraisers.

Would you take financial advice from some random yokel you don’t know? That’s what you’re doing when you use Ebay to estimate value. You’re not looking at the actual value of the item; you’re looking at what someone thinks they could get for it—And that person is no more qualified to judge than than you are.

So I’ve told you a whole bunch of things you shouldn’t do. So what should you do? Well, that’s easy. If I can’t put a value on an item because I’m not a trained appraiser, you need to find a trained appraiser.

You can generally find one in the phone book (or Google, for my younger crowd.) An appraiser can actually look at an item and tell you how much it’s worth. My usual advice is to find an appraiser who doesn’t also sell—Many appraisers will just give you a value for a flat fee, and that’s what you want. Sometimes, if an appraiser also sells, there’s a possibility he’ll try to lowball you to maximize his own profit. Most of them are pretty honest, but why take the chance? Just pay for a fair appraisal.

That’s my advice—Don’t ask me, and don’t ask some random guy online. We don’t know. Ask the appraiser who does know. Because if one more person comes to me and tries to pressure me into giving them a value, I may just snap and attack them with an 1800s-era Mann factory axe, which I am also unqualified to put a price on.